At several places at which we stopped the peasants came to us to ask medical advice for themselves and their animals, and we were exceedingly sorry that we could not prescribe for either; for their own ideas of doctoring border on superstition, and seem to follow the plan of killing pain by pain. At one village we witnessed (and protested against) the treatment of an unfortunate horse which had, by strange mishap, swollen to an abnormal size. A stout cord was put around its tail close to the root and twisted with a stick until all circulation in the tail was stopped. Then, when the appendage had become numb, a wire nail was driven into it in four places. The horse died of complications, including lockjaw. A horse which, at a stage of the journey, carried our luggage, possessed but one ear. We asked what had become of the other, and were told that it had been cut off piece by piece to cure repeated fits. There is often to be seen in Macedonia, especially in the Monastir district, a thing resembling a big bird’s-nest built on stilts. The nestling wears a soldier’s costume and carries a gun. He is a field guard, an institution of the Government designed to ‘protect’ Christian peasants from ‘brigands,’ Albanian and Bulgarian. This he often accomplishes by becoming a member of a band of the former. The Governor-General will show you yard-long petitions stamped with many tiny seals, the marks of the peasants, pleading that no Christians be put to guard them, as the Austro-Russian reform scheme provides. The signatures to these petitions are not secured in the general way, by a Turk with a loaded gun; they are _bona fide_. The peasants really do not want the protection of a half-hearted Christian, who has probably never before handled a gun, and who will only bring disaster upon them. The Turkish guard is a contemptuously tolerant creature. His band is strong enough to defend the peasants from other marauders, and so long as they pay the annual tribute of so many sheep or goats, and so much grain, there is no other call upon them--except for the needs of the bird in the nest. The committee’s agents, when laying their cause before Europeans, will designate this bird a vulture, and tell you how he exacts maidens of the peasants; but the Greeks, who claim to be the enlightened people of the country, explain that this, to a Macedonian peasant, is not what it is to an Englishman or an American. There are always two sides to a question.